Consider what that friendship is made of, because its substance is not sentiment.

It is steel, moving in both directions. Serbian munitions flowed to Israel on dozens of cargo flights after October 2023, with exports rising dramatically over two years.

In return, Israel has sold Serbia some of the most advanced offensive military hardware in the region: rockets with a range of 300 kilometers, a $1.6 billion Elbit package with deliveries extending to the end of the decade, and a drone factory outside Belgrade in which the Israeli firm holds a controlling stake.

This is not merely a customer relationship. It is an increasingly integrated military partnership in which Israeli industry plays a central role.

Consider, too, what many Bosniaks and Albanians believe this relationship has helped legitimize. Bosnia and Herzegovina's Serb entity, Republika Srpska, placed its commission to reexamine Srebrenica under an Israeli historian, drawing on Jewish scholarly credentials in a process that many viewed as an attempt to diminish the established understanding of the genocide.

And when Milorad Dodik, who has repeatedly challenged the characterization of Srebrenica as genocide, sought relief from U.S. sanctions, the lobbyist who took the contract happened to chair Republicans Overseas Israel.

The sanctions were lifted last autumn. Belgrade and Banja Luka have learned that Israel's moral authority on genocide can be borrowed and then turned against the memory of the very Muslims, Bosniak and Albanian, it was meant to shield.